journalism

The Palestinians have long been seen as an obstacle by Israel’s leaders; an irritant to be subjugated. Noam Chomsky commented:

Traditionally over the years, Israel has sought to crush any resistance to its programs of takeover of the parts of Palestine it regards as valuable, while eliminating any hope for the indigenous population to have a decent existence enjoying national rights.

He also noted:

With the fiftieth anniversary of the My Lai massacre, it freshly occured to me that the harrowing subject of My Lai actually also sheds some light on the reality of the decline in real journalism in the modern age. I would assert that you can track the decline in the integrity and purpose of mainstream […]

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA – Search engine and advertising monolith Google continued to press its offensive against alternative media this week with an announcement unveiling a new $300 million project called the Google News Initiative.
The initiative encompasses a range of new projects announced by the tech giant, which has long been accused of enjoying a monopoly position and of siphoning off digital advertising revenue from traditional news publishers.

The people that write and publish the news are among the most powerful people on earth.
Does this sound like an extreme claim? It might because of the expressed level of cynicism about events and stories that are printed or broadcast in various news media. When I ask my friends and colleagues, they often respond with the blanket statement that “all the news media are lying anyway.”
But then…

QUITO, ECUADOR (Special Report) — Rita Anaya¹ was a 25-year-old graduate student living in southern California when Venezuelan activists invited her to travel to their homeland for the first time in 2007. Her initial response, she freely acknowledges now, was one of ambivalence, but when you’re the daughter of a Chicano farmworker and a Jewish labor organizer (from Queens, no less), there’s a sort of Calvinist inevitability to these things: ”You are who you are before you’re born, player,” as Jay-Z might say.

Good friend and frequent guest Stephen Singular joins me today to discuss his latest book and first novel In the Cards. The book deals with the 2000 election and one journalists effort to expose the corruption and manipulation of the results by the GOP. Stephen begins by giving us an overview of the novel and what led him to write it. He also discusses the setting and the circumstances around the rigged 2000 election. We then talk about the novels protagonist, freelance journalist Jimmy Iverson. Stephen talks about the sort of person that Jimmy is and the journalistic ideals that he holds.

‘I have tried trade, but I found that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil.’1
Noam Chomsky once emailed us:

India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) — a counter-terrorism law enforcement agency — has outlined what Kashmiri journalists should report on in a court response that was issued after the arrest of 23-year-old Kashmiri photojournalist Kamran Yousuf.

WASHINGTON (Analysis) — Shortly after a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman of murder for the fatal shooting of an unarmed teenager, the celebrated African-American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in the Atlantic Monthly:

WASHINGTON (Opinion) — Meryl Streep received her 21st Oscar nomination last week for her portrayal of Katharine Graham in Steven Spielberg’s thriller, The Post. The film depicts the iconic newspaper publisher and her storied editor, Ben Bradlee (played by Tom Hanks), staring down a ruthless Nixon administration and cautious shareholders to print the secret government study that put paid to the official lies undergirding the Vietnam War, in an act of heroism that saved the Fourth Estate if not American democracy itself.
Talk about fake news.